Scotland on Sunday 15 April 2026
As coming-of-age stories go, it takes some beating. Maggie Wallace was just 20 and working as a machinist in the Lee Jeans factory in Greenock when she and her fellow workers took a dramatic form of industrial action. Outraged by the plan by the American owner, the Vanity Fair Corporation, to shut down production, they staged a sit-in.
For the next seven months, if Wallace was not shacking up in the factory, she was out on the road, drumming up support from trades unions and discovering her gift for a galvanising speech. Quite a leap from the mischievous youngster she had been on the day the occupation began.
“We thought it was funny,” she says today, looking out across the Clyde and welling up with the memory of those formative months. “You’re still at home with your parents and you were classed as a child. We were young and we went along with it. Then, as time went on, we realised there was more to it than that.” [READ MORE]